


Encircled

by miranda_wave (miranda_askher)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode: s04e12 The Stolen Earth, F/M, Flashbacks, I do what I want with the extended universe, M/M, Multi, No knowledge of classic DW required, Not exactly the romance you were expecting, Tenth Doctor Era, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2017-12-06 20:01:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 13,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/739551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miranda_askher/pseuds/miranda_wave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All his long life, the Doctor has never really known what he's running from--or running towards. And then, on a dirty street at the end of the Earth as we know it, Rose takes a Dalek disruptor blast for him. Things change--or maybe they already had. AU from <i>The Stolen Earth.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by [fannishliss](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fannishliss), 'cause she's awesome.
> 
>  _Doctor Who_ is not my sandbox, but I do love playing in it.

__**Gallifrey  
** 2004716.44 RE  
Theta is eight 

_Just as the shaky vid-image of Rassilon enters the Panopticon, his chamber door crashes open. He knows who it is even before the intruder speaks. Nobody else crashes through_ anything _in the House of Lungbarrow._

 _“Oh, Thete, why are you watching that again? It’s just a history lesson._ Boooo-ring. _” A dirty hand snakes around his shoulder and stops the video. He sighs dramatically and turns to face the dark-haired boy behind him._

_“History is interesting, Kosch. I can’t wait—”_

_“—until you have your own TARDIS and you can go see it for yourself,” Koschei recites with a long-suffering eye-roll. “We’re_ eight _. We’re not even initiated yet and then we’ll be lucky if they let us out of the Academy in thirty_ years _. Come outside while we still can.”_

_Theta rolls his eyes in return and gestures at his heavy red robes. “My Lord Father confiscated all of my ordinary clothes. I ruined the cloak I was meant to wear for Examinations yesterday in the Monoliths, and I’m not allowed out.”_

_A slow, sly grin spreads across Koschei’s face. “Then I suppose you’ll have to ruin that set of ceremonial robes as well. Think of it this way: the Patriarch has asked for it.”_

_Theta’s face twists with indecision. “Kosch, I_ can’t— _”_

 _“Because you’d rather watch history? Or because you’re_ scared _? Bet you’re scared,” Koschei jeers, shifting with impatience._

_“My Lord Father—”_

_“Isn’t your master, Thete!”_

_“But I_ want _to honor his wishes. I don’t want to cause...trouble,” Theta lies unconvincingly._

_Koschei sighs in disappointment. “He treats you like you’re an Outsider, just because you’re womb-born.”_

_Theta says nothing. Koschei isn’t wrong._

_“I’ll be in the forest if you change your mind about being_ perfect _.”_

_“At the hideout?” Theta smiles a little._

_“Yeah.”_

_He turns back to his desk and fumbles under the sleek surface. “Will you take something there for me?”_

_“Bring it yourself. Then you’ll have to_ come _, right? See you.” Koschei scowls—the hideout isn’t as much fun alone—and flounces from the room, radiating annoyance. He slams the door just as loudly on his way out._

 _Theta pulls his hand from beneath the desk silently and sets the datacube in front of him. He stares at it. It’s_ not allowed _. That’s why he has to hide it. It’s not the standard history vid, and his House would disown him if they found out he had stolen it from the Great Library. No one would find it in the hiding place. His family doesn’t think he’s clever enough to have a hiding place_ inside _his hideout, and it would be safe there when he goes away to the Capitol. If Kosch won’t take it for him, he’ll_ have _to break the rules to get it there._

_He gestures at his screen to start the video one more time, putting off both the violation and the humiliation of having his father shout at him about dishonor in front of the assembled Cousins again. The archaic two-dimensional recording flows: Rassilon stands in the atrium outside the Panopticon with his retinue, preparing to announce his plan to create a temporal power source so immense the people of Gallifrey would become the Lords of Time. The doors fly open and Rassilon enters first, imposing in his velvet regalia and mirror-bright headdress and looking every bit the pompous idiot to Theta’s eyes. A train of awed engineers, aides, and Council pages scuttles along in his shadow. After him comes Omega, who looks terribly uncomfortable. Even the drape of his cloak seems tense with worry, and Theta wonders if he knew even then what he would sacrifice in creating the Eye._

_His tutors have taught him well, and Rassilon and Omega are figures as familiar as the current Lady President. It’s the third person, the one who comes after Omega’s small crew of technical assistants, who fascinates Theta._

_In a room full of bright velvet and gold that covers all but the face, her robe is grey-blue, simple, and sleeveless, her black hair uncovered and loose. In a room full of people who can change face, race, and sex, she is_ different _, singular, like her skin is truly hers instead of a mask she wears. In a room full of pretense and posturing, she walks alone, confident and enigmatic, and, all those thousands of years ago, as she passes the camera, she sweeps just a little too close and_ winks _._

_At him._

_She is last in a long line, and as she passes the image pans so he can see her walking away, off into the lost reaches of history. Aside from a tiny glimpse in the background of Omega’s speech, it is the last recorded image of her: a grey robe, black hair, and icy pale skin, a perfect canvas for the tattoo of twining green vines and strange blood-red flowers that embraces the back of her shoulder._

_Rassilon begins to speak, but Theta pays no attention: this part is in the official vids--in fact, it_ is _the official vid. He’s checked. The mysterious woman, the only person who walked with Rassilon and Omega as though she had at least as much of a right to take the floor of the Panopticon as they did, has vanished. Rassilon, Omega, and, he guesses, the Other. His favorite legend, given a face._

_Theta wonders who she was really, what she did that caused her to be deleted from history, from the Matrix, from any record but invincible myth and one secret vid. It intrigues him, the thought that anyone could cause so much trouble and still look funny and kind. But most of all, he wonders what it will be like to meet her once he has his own TARDIS._

_He glances out the window. The sky over Perdition is growing redder by the minute. He’ll have to hurry. Perhaps if he doesn’t get_ too _dirty… Catching up the datacube, he throws his oldest tunic over his robes and slips out the door to Koschei and the place where they keep their secrets._

* * * * *

**London, Earth  
** 2008  
The Doctor is 904 

He means it when he tells Donna this could be the end of everything. But for him, that is not nearly enough. 

_Bad Wolf._

She is everywhere, and he is right that the walls between universes must be dissolving, and it may be the greatest danger he has ever faced. It is horrific, simply the thought of it. But every impossible space between the atoms of the world is suddenly full of her, and he knows it is only a matter of time.

Then there is a momentary lull in the fight, and she is at one end of the street, and he is at the other. _Ask her yourself._ And they run. 

He sees it too late, the telltale gleam along a shiny edge angled just so, glinting off a metal that does not, should not, exist on Earth. With a shout, he veers left, arms outstretched-- _run, Rose, run!_ \--but the Dalek is already compensating, its weapon already tracking him. And Rose is still moving, and then she dives, shoving him to the ground beneath her as she rolls, raises her rifle, fires.

The Dalek smolders. But as he crawls to his feet and stares unexpectedly into the appalled face of Jack Harkness, it hits him: there were two shots.

He crashes back to his knees beside the huddled figure in blue leather only seconds before Jack reaches them, Donna close on his heels. The Doctor reaches for Rose’s shoulder and forces himself to roll her down onto her back.

Alive.

Her head is thrown back in an arch of pain, teeth gritted and tears tracking down her cheeks. “Doctor?” she manages.

“Oh God, Rosie,” Jack murmurs, as Donna takes her hand. “We’re here.”

Jack crouches by the Doctor and starts taking vitals. His face is unreadable, which means...it means what he already knows it means. The Doctor’s brain refuses to think, to take in the situation, the three of them crouched around Rose in the middle of a dark street as the world shatters. The dark, oozing energy burn along her left shoulder.

“Get her inside,” he blurts without meaning to. Jack and Donna look up sharply. “We need to get her inside, I mean. She shouldn’t...be here. Not here. Not in the _street_.”

“In the infirmary, I think I can help—” Jack begins, standing up with him, but the Doctor shakes his head and the other man breaks off. He stares fixedly at the remains of the Dalek smoking on the asphalt. 

Together the three of them carry Rose home to the TARDIS.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Koschei is the childhood name of the Master.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Read the warning. No, seriously, read the warning.

__**Barcelona  
** 5186  
The Doctor is 312 

_Sometimes it is easier to think when he is alone, and easiest of all when he is alone in a crowd. Perhaps that is the most breathtakingly, exhilaratingly lonely place of all, a singularity surrounded by motion. It is a feeling he never would have experienced on Gallifrey, where the crowd—had there been market-day crowds in the Citadel—would have bled into his subconscious, eating into his self. Even traveling with Susan, her constant comforting presence was a reminder of the overwhelming pressure of Cousins and classmates he had always felt on his mind._

_On the days he misses Susan most, he reminds himself to treasure that little core of quiet in a primitive city square bustling with humans, on a tiny colony world thousands of years after he left her behind._

_He has come here for a particular sort of raw mineral that the TARDIS has been going through at an alarming rate recently. No amount of tinkering, cajoling, or cross-referencing the operator’s guide seems to set that right. He is almost to the point of throwing the manual into an exploding star in a fit of uncharacteristic drama. This is his fourth trip to Catalonia’s second moon, Barcelona, in as many weeks. Even the noseless dogs are starting to become familiar._

_As luck would have it, the merchant he needs to speak to seems to be having a lie-in; though the other stalls are busy, the mineral trader’s is shut tight. The Doctor contemplates jumping the TARDIS a few hours forward, but discards the idea: if the trajectory goes awry and he finds himself without the crystals he needs, he could be in real trouble._

_He hates waiting. Rassilon knows he did enough of it when he was younger. Yet here he is, on a planet with no tea, too primitive for even a newspaper._

_There is a coffee-seller three booths down from the shuttered minerals stall, and the Doctor strolls over to it, queuing up with practiced politeness (he has always loathed queuing, and finds it bizarre that an otherwise crowded and boisterous world is so attached to it). He plants his stick in front of him and clasps the head under his palms, leaning slightly as he watches the marketplace bustle. The principles of commerce have never eluded humans; from the first tribes to the Bountiful Empires, he has witnessed variations on this same scene. Even an abandoned and regressed colony world like this one treasures its trade, clad here in homespun instead of strange and expensive fashions. Children dart through the streets, some playing, young and fresh-faced, while their older siblings fetch and carry in the stalls, already marked by the ritual scarifications of puberty. Some of the adults’ bodies look more like canvases than skin, raised white lines highlighted by vivid color. The market could be nearly anywhere; the art is uniquely Barcelona._

_The Doctor steps forward with the queue, eyeing the still-silent ore-dealer’s stall. It has been a long time since he took much notice of tattoos, and even longer since he studied them, searching for what turned out to be one of the commonest designs in the universe._

_Finally he arrives at the makeshift counter, washed in fragrant steam and the scent of roasting beans. On the other side, an elderly woman deftly transfers ground beans to pot and pours hot water from an impossible height without spilling a drop, her movements far surer than her age would suggest. She raises an eyebrow at him across the stream of water, and he realizes belatedly that credits will do him no good here. Propping his stick against the side of the booth, he digs in his pockets hastily, coming up with a huge handful of change. Without too much trouble he extracts what he thinks is the right Barcelonan coin, handing it over._

_“Terribly sorry about that,” he says to the old woman. She pours him a tiny cup of thick coffee, and he steps aside to drink it._

_Most of the Barcelonans drink their coffee down rapidly before handing their cups back to the stall owner and heading about their day. This crowd is no exception, gulping the scalding liquid precipitously before slapping each other on the back and dispersing with vigorous good wishes. The Doctor takes a rare quiet moment to savor his, an eddy in the cool morning sunshine surrounded by a tide of noise. Primitive world or not, Barcelona is a hidden gem when it comes to coffee, virtually unknown because of the moon’s isolation. By the time he reaches the dregs, the line has dissipated and the mineral-seller, looking distinctly worse-for-wear, is sluggishly setting up his goods._

_The Doctor turns back to the coffee stall. He passes the diminutive cup back to the old woman, brusque thanks forming on his lips. She speaks before he can._

_“You decided to bring my cup back then, yes?” He starts to reply but she cuts in again, slipping into a bad imitation of his accent, “Took you long enough, eh?” Her face is serious, but her eyes are positively dancing. Now that he can see her without the fog of steam, the Doctor wonders fleetingly how he could have thought her old, and then, catching that thought, eyes her critically for a brief moment. Like most Barcelonans, she is simply dressed but healthy, with the same friendly demeanor of the rest of the market. He suspects she is rather more clever than she lets on, but really the only thing that distinguishes her from the other townspeople is the plainness of her skin. She has her sleeves rolled up to the elbow, but he catches sight of only one marking, snaking its way out from under the leather cuff and bangles she wears on her left wrist. Her face is perfectly clear, like a child’s. And she is smirking at him, as if she knows exactly what is going through his head._

_“Plaid,” she enunciates clearly._

_“Hmm?” he replies, startled out of his rude reverie._

_“You are wearing plaid.” She gestures in the direction of his trousers. “And you stare at me! Men! All the same!” She throws up her hands, the picture of good-natured indignation, but in the crinkle of her eyes and the twitch of her lips, she is laughing at him, and at herself. “Go! Take your silly trousers away from here!” Flapping her hands at him dismissively, she pours more green coffee beans into her pan and turns her attention to roasting them._

_He obeys, smiling in spite of himself, in a fresh good mood that even bargaining with a hungover merchant does not dispel._

* * * * *

**London, Earth  
** 2008  
The Doctor is 904 

In the infirmary, Jack lifts Rose gently onto the bed. She is whimpering audibly now, as he yanks the surgical light around and aims it at the wound. 

“Donna, would you find us a blanket, please? Doctor, what do you think, dermal mender or--?” All the while he peels back Rose’s ruined jacket and shirt, fingers working deftly to expose the burn.

The Doctor shakes his head and reaches a trembling hand out to stroke Rose’s hair. “It won’t work.” 

“Won’t work? Do you have nanogenes, then?” Jack asks. “It looks like a deep burn, possible nerve and muscle damage, but nanogenes--oh, _shit_.” He stares down at the livid mark, uncovered at last. Before their eyes, it is growing in size, the damaged areas worsening visibly and charring away the vines of a tattoo twining across her collarbone. “Doctor, what the hell is this?”

The Doctor does not turn away from Rose. “Nanogenes won’t work either, Jack,” he says, almost too quietly to hear. “Not any more than they would have worked on you.”

“Here’s a blanket--” Donna begins as she barges back through the door, just as Jack says “Doctor--”, but he interrupts them both, words wrenching themselves from his unwilling throat.

“The Daleks spent the last years of the war perfecting their weapons. A direct strike kills instantly, even for bi-vascular species. A glancing hit...the blast doesn’t stop working. It breaks down the walls between cells, and it...spreads.”

He stops and turns back to them, not looking at the expressions of shock on Jack’s face and stricken horror on Donna’s. Instead he simply hands Jack a small vial. 

“This is all you can do for her.”

“What is it?” Donna asks.

“Analgesic. Give her 5 cc’s.”

“She’s weakening,” Jack cautions. “Will that be too--”

The Doctor shakes his head stiffly. He ignores Donna’s gasped _Oh God_ , anything but Jack’s hands drawing up the drug and Rose’s agony before him.

“Intravenous?” The younger man prods gently in the hollow of her elbow.

“Yes,” he replies shortly.

Jack administers the shot and steps back. Rose is already quieting a little.

“Come on,” Jack murmurs, pressing a kiss to Rose’s forehead. “Let’s step outside, Donna.” 

Donna allows Jack to take her arm and pull her from the room in silence. The Doctor closes the door softly and circles the bed to drag a laboratory stool closer to its head. 

“Rose?”

She nods a little and turns her face toward him, opening her eyes.

“You’re okay,” she whispers weakly. “That’s good. I’m glad.” 

“Rose, I’m so so sorry.”

“I’m not. Well, I am, who wants to...” A tear creeps down her cheek. “But you’re safe. I want you safe.”

He opens his mouth, but no words come out. She lifts her hand sluggishly from the bed and traces the contours of his cheekbone, his lips, his chin before allowing the arm to flop back.

“’s cold in here,” she slurs, and he pulls the blanket up over her, covering the ruinous wound, even though the room is warm. “Doctor, I have so much to tell you. I was gonna…we were gonna...I never told you...”

Her eyes are glazing over. “You did,” he whispers, pressing his forehead to hers. “You told me. I heard you. I always hear you. And I never have a chance to tell you...”

He pulls back to look at her. She’s still in there, in her eyes, but he doubts she has the strength to speak any more. So he does something he dreamed of doing for all the years of her absence and quite some time before: he lets his fingers find her temple and _shows_ her. 

When he lifts his hand from her cheek, she is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YES YES I KNOW *dodges flying objects*


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This chapter includes thoughts of suicide.

__**New York City, Earth  
** 1970  
The Doctor is 897 

_The Doctor knows it is over, all over--almost all over. Gallifrey is--well. The battle is done, even if the last images he saw before that long, long flash still hang between him and the remnants of his life. If they do not consume him, he knows the coughing will._

_The pain in his hands where their last desperate weapon seared itself to him and then disappeared, taking his skin with it, threatens to blind him. In his head, charred and smoking fingers, barely more than skeletal and reeking of burnt flesh, snake out to crush the life from a living throat. The flames have vanished, but deep in the tissue, his hands are still burning, an agony that cannot be quenched. In his head, it no longer matters whether the hands are his, or the throat, or both. There is no longer any line between killing and dying. The coughing will consume him. He is choking on it. Choking on burnt hands and seared lungs, planetary dust and the horrible stifling silence when Romana’s last transmission cut out before he could--_

_The TARDIS is keening and shivering around him, death throes as clear to him as his own. A tiny useless part of him, a part that used to have skin on his palms and air in his lungs, knows he has to land, if he still can with the console so ravaged and his hands nearly useless. It is a small practical piece, the part of him that has managed to react to trouble well enough that he has not died before today. It is a part that assumes--infuriatingly and without asking his preference--that he will go on living._

_He coughs. The ship shakes with it, sparks shooting from the shorting console as he spits thick blood on the deck._

_He rights himself somehow and stumbles toward the console, using his least-injured fingers to jerk at his ascot. He yanks it from his collar and awkwardly tries to wrap it around his grotesquely burnt right hand. It will make no difference--it will_ hurt _\--but even now he can hardly bear the thought of feeling the controls tangle in his bones and sinew. The clumsy flapping silk veils the afterimage of Romana’s horrified face as she discovered that Arcadia was lost, that there was no longer any hope and truly, there never had been. The last image of Romana, burnt on the charred mind of the last person who could remember she had ever lived. The person who killed her._

 _The Doctor tucks up the ends of the bandage snugly and_ screams _at the meeting of cloth and flesh. The shriek tears again at his lungs, and he coughs and coughs and coughs until he knows there can be nothing left of him._

_Groping blindly in the console, he pulls what feels like the broken end of the throttle, twists what he thinks was once the temporal compass. This is a blind leap, with no computer to save him. But if he flies into a star, at least it will be over quickly. He yanks the ignition lever and falls to his knees._

_The landing is violent and final. But it is a landing. And suddenly the Doctor craves fresh air, craves it more than he has ever craved anything. Even before he can get to the exit he feels cold wind; the TARDIS has used what might be her last energy to open the door for him._

_He stumbles through it and promptly collapses in the snow. He has no idea what city this is, only that it is snowing and cold, so cold in this dirty alley. His hands are still burning, but he shivers violently, pulling himself up to sit against the now-closed door. The TARDIS has locked him out. Perhaps she is dead. The unaccustomed sucking void in his head is so overwhelmingly horrifying that one more loss would hardly make an impression._

_He wraps his arms around his knees. His lungs are burnt and filling with fluid, his left heart is arrhythmic, his hands are a ruin, and there is only a tiny part of his mind left that is not mad. Yet he does not die. He sits in the snow and coughs and spits blood into a growing red patch beside him, and does not die._

_When he raises his head again, there is a child beside him, a dark-haired human girl perhaps nine years old. She looks at him calmly, with neither fear nor alarm. She carries a tiny backpack slung over her puffy purple coat, like she has just come from school (_ Susan, if she had been only a little younger, coming home to him through the junkyard...but no more, never again... _)._

_She has not come from school. She is not a child. He knows this, and suspects she is not even there. He is going mad._

_“It’s all right,” she whispers kindly, a world of sorrow in her thin, high little girl’s voice. “You’re dying. But it’s all right.”_

_He can feel something besides pain in his skin and bones, a familiar tingle, a different kind of pain. He stifles it and shivers harder._

_The girl lays a small hand on his shoulder, stronger and more comforting than her size implies. Her fingernails are a collection of minute cartoon press-ons. A line of temporary tattoos of insects and flowers marches up her hairline in front of her left ear. Her boots are green with raised eyes like a frog’s. She should be on a playground. She should not be here in the cold, comforting a ravaged genocide with a pool of his congealing blood between them._

_“You’re going to be all right,” she says again, earnestly. “Do you hear me?”_

_The snow at their feet is beginning to reflect a golden light. He takes as deep a breath as he dares and forces it back, until the snow is sickly pale again._

_The child_ growls _like a creature much larger and more ferocious. “Don’t fight it._ Live. _”_

_“No,” he whispers, eyes squeezed closed._

_Her hand withdraws and for a moment he thinks she has left him to die in peace, but then something immensely hard hits him in the side of the head and he collapses helplessly to the ground._

_Slowly, distantly, he sees a brick fall into the snow somewhere near his knees. Then she kneels down, bending until her face is mere inches from his own._

_“Live, you idiot,” she commands, the words echoing dimly to him long after her mouth has stopped moving. Her eyes are fierce and sharp, holding in them a whole world of love and sorrow and impossible comprehension. She squeezes his shoulder one last time and steps back._

_He knows he could not stop the regeneration now, stunned as the brick has left him, so he does not try. Instead he rides it out silent and resigned, feeling tears track his cheeks all the way through. The little girl watches silently as the light consumes and reshapes him, as he desperately rips off his gory makeshift bandage to reveal hands that are whole and strong and mockingly clean. When he has calmed, she comes closer and studies his new face, smiling sadly._

_She stretches out one tiny hand to touch his alien cheekbone, and he flinches, turning his face away. “Don’t get up,” she instructs when he tries to roll onto his hands and knees. “You’re going to pass out.” Then a glitter of gold around the edges of his vision overtakes him and sucks him away with a howl._

_When he awakens hours later with a vicious headache, he recalls only snatches of a strange regeneration dream: a child, or a woman, a voice who was still there when he had lost everything else. He cannot quite remember a face. The fresh snow around him shows no tracks, but near the TARDIS door he finds half a sheet of children’s temporary tattoos, hearts and roses for Valentine’s Day._

_He leaves it there._

* * * * *

**London, Earth  
** 2008  
The Doctor is 904 

As if from a great distance, the Doctor sees but does not feel himself open the door of the infirmary, walk through it, and close it again. He does not linger as he did at Canary Wharf; there is nothing for him on the other side of this barrier. Nothing.

His companions are gathered a short distance down the hallway. They blur for a moment in front of him--two sharp angles of worry--but he cannot afford to weep. He ignores the question in Jack’s eyes and does not stop him when Jack kisses Donna gently on the top of the head and re-enters the infirmary alone. 

“Doctor--” Donna begins (his indomitable Donna, never willing to give up, as if that can save any of them), but he keeps walking without turning his face, past her and onward to the console room. 

There is a war to fight, just as there is always a war to fight. And this time he will win it, or he will finally, finally die trying.

At the console, the Doctor refuses to slump, to surrender to the icy numbness. The portion of his mind that cannot stop thinking--maddening, even when it is a happy babble--churns away with plans and strategies that tend more towards vicious revenge than the protection of the universe. There is a dark path opening up there, manifest in a choice of coordinates and the reach between the throttle at one hand and the temporal uncertainty modulator at the other.

It would be so easy. So easy. Far easier to be the hand of destruction than this world’s defender.

 _Rose Tyler, Defender of the Earth._

For her, he could--wishes furiously to--start another Time War. In her name, he will not. But that in no way rules out making the Daleks’ demise as immediate and thorough as possible. It’s simply a matter of--

The TARDIS gives a sudden heave, and even with the temporal-inertial compensation, he can feel her moving awkwardly through the physical world.

Out of time, then.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eight's regeneration scene is based in part on Melody Pond's first regeneration as depicted at the end of _Day of the Moon_ \--specifically the setting and some of the little girl's lines. This is intended as homage...obviously I own nothing, blah blah blah.
> 
> Yes, the story is now going to be seven chapters instead of eight--a result of revisions. Almost halfway there!
> 
> EDIT October 2015: If anyone is joining us for the first time, this story was written in early 2013, before the 50th anniversary. I suppose you can read Eight here as the War Doctor, but it's not meant to fit in that continuity, and he's Paul McGann in my head.
> 
> (Unfortunately Paul McGann is not actually in my head, or anywhere near me.)


	4. Chapter 4

__**Southampton, Earth  
1912  
The Doctor is 898**

_“Oi! You there!” The Doctor waves at a young docker, who stands idling in the shade of an enormous ship after loading the last of many trunks. “Hello! Is that the Titanic?”_

_The boy looks up, and the Doctor revises his estimate of perhaps seventeen years, read in the easy strength of the muscles beneath his dark-skinned shoulders and still-naïve laughter at the other dockers’ rough jokes, upwards to at least twenty-five. Maybe more: he’s seen younger eyes on grandfathers. The boy--man--gives him a quick appraisal and then a slow, spreading smile of unwonted familiarity. If this were the twenty-first century instead of the early twentieth, in a certain sort of bar, he might be prepared for that, but now? More than a little forward._

_“This ship, guv?” the young man replies, leaning back against a stack of crates and rolling his broad bare shoulders lazily._

_“Yes, this ship, the one you’ve just been loading.”_

_“The one and very same. Biggest ship in the world, they say. Un_ sink _able.” He snorts. “Bloody reckless thing to say if you ask me.”_

_“Tempting fate a bit, yeah?” The Doctor sets his overwarm leather jacket on another crate and perches beside it. “Are you sailing on her?”_

_“Me?” The other man shakes his head, scratching absently at his cropped curls. “Not for love or good cash money. Got no money and love’s a complicated thing, she is. You?”_

_“Thinking on it. I’ve got an appointment, you might say, and she’s going the right way. When does she leave?”_

_“Tomorrow. Big to-do and all, you must’ve heard about it.” The man picks up a hammer and starts nailing one of the crates closed._

_“Hmm,” the Doctor replies thoughtfully. He raises his voice over the clamor of hammering. “Got a job for you, if you’re interested.”_

_The docker stops and raises an eyebrow. “You’re not asking me to sail with you, are you? Because I’m not gettin’ on that tub. And I’m not that kind of man.” But there’s the lascivious little smile again--which is far more intriguing that it ought to be._

_“Uh, no.” The Doctor grins brightly to cover the unexpected tug of the idea. This body is full of surprises. “But I need you to sneak something into the hold for me. Just another box--a big box, but that’s all. Without saying anything about it to your chief.”_

_The docker lounges along his crate, tossing his hammer idly in one hand while giving the Doctor a more appraising look. “Yeah, I could maybe do that. For cash and something to remember you by.”_

_Warily the Doctor replies, “I don’t do mementos.”_

_“Thought as much. So I’ll do your job, but buy me a drink first.”_

_The Doctor is about to demur and find a dockhand less interested in flirting, but his eyes are still following the spinning hammer, the ripple of the muscles controlling it, and the trace of green vine that snakes across the shifting skin. Just as his mouth opens, the hammer drops._

_“Aw, shit! Missed ‘er.” The docker leans over the crate and stretches to retrieve his tool, and the Doctor’s eyes follow that green vine as it twists over the now-exposed forearm to join with leaves, stems, and finally a rose._

_Common it may be, but he still can’t quite resist the pointless compulsion of that tattoo._

_“A drink,” he says slowly. “I can do that. Do you know a place?” The Doctor surveys the shipyards and slums around them doubtfully._

_“Course I know a place.” The young man drops his hammer and extends the empty hand. “Lucas. Who are you now?”_

__Interesting question _, the Doctor thinks. “Pleased to meet you, Lucas. I’m the Doctor.”_

_Lucas smiles slyly. “Doctor who?”_

_*_

_The pub is not the sort he came to enjoy during his long Earth exile, lifetimes ago; it is gritty and worn, full of scarred men and conversation he avoids listening to for reasons he avoids acknowledging. It suits him._

_Lucas is surprisingly witty, and as the night goes on--much later than he intended--the Doctor finds him more and more compelling, his smile a bright twinkle of light in the smoky room. If he were human, he would blame the rough beer as the banter turns playful and he finds himself responding in kind. And when Lucas reaches out to take his hand, running one nail from the tip of his third finger across his palm and up the exposed inside of his wrist, something in him twists violently, painful and irresistible at once. He seizes the young man’s arm and tugs him out the back door._

_Lucas has a room, an anonymous room in an anonymous house, and when the Doctor wakes in a patch of thin sunlight from the dirty window, the docker is already gone. The Titanic sails today, but he lets his face rest in the threadbare pillow for a moment, breathing in the human scent of male sweat and ecstasy. There is something underneath those smells, something cracked open in him that revels in the momentary connection, the feeling of_ not-alone _, just as his mind recoils from it. It persists: a callused thumb on the still-unfamiliar skin of his chest, inhaling air from another set of lungs, a tattooed arm twining across his body in the afterglow._

_Not alone._

_He climbs from the bed, savoring the aches and a shocking lack of regret. Regrets are his specialty: his friends, his…well, the war, the peaces he was unable to negotiate, the ship he will not save today, the girl he could not persuade to join him in 2005. But as he collects his scattered clothing, pulling it back on over the vulnerabilities of companionship, a scrap of paper flutters from his jacket._

__

> Don’t regret it, Doctor. Look me up sometime, won’t you?  
> \- Lucas Malcolm

__

_At the bottom of the note, anachronistically, is a doodle of a flower on a twining vine._

_The Doctor slips from the boardinghouse and returns to the docks with his disguised TARDIS, but Lucas is nowhere to be found. Another docker approaches him._

_“Shipping that, aren’t you?” he drawls in an odd, half-American accent. He begins harnessing the police-box-sized crate with ropes. “A friend told me to look out for you.”_

_“Ah, yes. Right. Thanks. I’m the Doctor, cabin 110, and I’ll be picking it up myself at the other end,” he lies, because he will, of course, be picking it up somewhere midway across the North Atlantic._

_“I know who you are,” the man smirks, raising a dark, flirtatious eyebrow beneath the brim of his oversized hat. “Hey Tom! Get over here and take this. I’ve got other crews to run.”_

_He shrugs into a long blue-gray wool coat. “Sorry, Doctor. Places to be, people to boss, no time to kill.” And he strides away, calling over his shoulder, “Ship sails in an hour! Don’t be left behind, it’s a damn shame when that happens.”_

_When he is alone in his TARDIS again, the words return to him._ Don’t be left behind _, and_ don’t regret it.

_Not alone._

_Almost without thinking, he sets a course for London in 2005, and the girl he could not persuade to join him. Yet._

* * * * *

**The Medusa Cascade  
2008  
The Doctor is 904**

“The TARDIS is a weapon, and it will be destroyed!” the Dalek Controller crows over them as the floor grinds aside. And then his beautiful ship is gone. He stands alone with Jack and Donna in the bowels of the Crucible.

The Doctor no longer sees the point in caring, really. It hurts, of course, and losing the TARDIS will finally cut him off entirely from his home. All his homes: the ship herself, Gallifrey, Earth. But the Daleks will not let him suffer that loss for long. As a species, they see the usefulness of pain, but not prolonged torture, not if it means keeping an enemy alive in their midst. He has taught them that.

Now the TARDIS burns, his lost Rose with her. The pendulum swings.

Trapped in his bright prison, the Doctor is helpless to intervene as the Daleks collect all of them, all who are left, the Children of Time. And he is almost-- _almost_ \--grateful that this is going to be the end of everything, because he has no idea what to say to Jackie. Jackie, who keeps seeking his eyes desperately, hoping in spite of the fact that she clearly has already guessed. Mickey meets his glance once and nods, sadly, but with no delusions. Only one thing could keep Rose Tyler from the end of the world.

Which is 157 seconds away, and this time, finally, he can do nothing but wait. He ignores Davros, gloating in his glorified wheelchair, and wonders if perhaps the lower species throughout the universe have good reasons to embrace prayer at times like this, when nothing else is left.

The reality bomb continues to warm up, its hum growing louder. But beyond it, beyond the constant thrum, was that--? 

The Doctor jerks his head up, because it was: a familiar, impossible whistle. Followed by a familiar, impossible thump, followed in turn by another whistle.

“But that--” he exclaims, “that’s--”

“Impossible!” Davros screams. Yet the old blue wood continues to pulse into view.

Suddenly, the Doctor’s fury is back in full force, burning out the numbness. The impotent, vicious, stupid godling before him has counted his Slitheen before they hatched, but the Daleks did not call the Doctor the Oncoming Storm for nothing. And if his friends are willing to destroy worlds to stop them, if his TARDIS can return from an inferno to banish them--

With a final, decisive _whump_ , the TARDIS solidifies and stands, momentarily silent and monumental, with all eyes fixed on her doors: Jack’s full of anticipation and amusement; Donna’s with trepidation; Martha’s narrowed, ready for the game to change; Davros’, as always, wasted by centuries of hate.

The doors open, and the Doctor is abruptly reminded of a day long ago when his ship returned improbably and opened her doors in a blaze of light, carrying a terrible salvation. But this light is only light. The shadow in the doorway is not _hers_.

A young woman with singed coppery hair steps out of the TARDIS gingerly, as if her shoes pinch her feet. His own long coat dwarfs her shoulders but barely touches the ground. Every part of her is in disarray, except the determined, fearless expression on her face. 

“Treachery!” blares the Supreme Dalek. “Treachery and tricks! We will not be defeated by illusions!”

“Oh my God,” Jack breathes in wonder behind the Doctor. “Oh my _God_.”

“Who--” the Doctor croaks, “who the _hell_ are you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The flashback part of this chapter occurs during the 30 seconds between when the Doctor leaves Rose in "Rose", and when he returns to point out it also travels in time. 
> 
> Extra credit available for (a) catching the cameo at the Titanic, and (b) applying iffy translations to various names.


	5. Chapter 5

__**Antriska IV  
13621  
The Doctor is 901**

_“Run!” Rose shouts over the roar of thunder. She laughs and seizes his hand, forcing him out into the rain._

_“Rose—wait—we should_ stop _! Thunderstorm, really bad thunderstorm—it’s the Century Storm in fact—hey!” the Doctor rambles desperately as she tugs him along in her wake. There is so much water pounding into the street that it nearly is a wake. “Look! Tea! A teashop! There are really wonderful biscuits, we could eat some—”_

_Rose laughs again and hauls him along, not stopping for a second. Her gold hair is plastered against her cheeks; his shoes squelch with every step. In the middle of the city square she stops abruptly, using their joined hands to swing him around until he smacks straight into her with a sloppy, splashy_ whump _._

_“Hello,” he tries awkwardly. “Tea?”_

_“C’mon, Doctor! Didn’t you ever splash in puddles as a kid? Or do_ high-and-mighty _Time Lords—” she rolls her eyes in good-natured mockery “—hate getting a little wet and messy?”_

_There is a subtext there the Doctor stubbornly refuses to think about. And he has no particular wish to remember the scoldings he received as a child for doing exactly this, coming home soaked through and gleeful while all the younger Cousins whispered about him behind their hands._

_“I’ll have you know, Rose Tyler—” he begins, before his words are cut off by a tremendous sharp crack of thunder, no more than a block or two away. Rose jumps, letting out a little involuntary yelp at the closeness._

__Now you see what I mean, _he would say, but Rose’s startled jump has taken her just a little bit closer to him, exactly the distance to knock him off balance, and now both of them are falling in a wet disorganized tangle to the ground. He lands first, back-first in six inches of water, with her collapsing on top of him. The resulting splash drenches them even further, and the Doctor realizes regretfully that a few bits of him_ had _still been dry._

_Rose pins him to the ground, not moving, and for a horrible half-second he thinks she might be injured. Then he feels her shaking with laughter against him, giggles that reverberate in his breastbone and where her face is pressed into his shoulder. Suddenly he rather likes being soaking wet._

_“Did you fancy a swim?” he asks politely. She laughs harder, and, because she is irresistible and her laugh is delicious, he joins in. Soon the street rings with it even over the rain. The Doctor is sure there are locals watching them through windows from nice, dry sitting rooms, shaking their heads at two mad offworlders tangled together in a puddle in the middle of the street. He feels like there must be one, but he cannot think of a single reason why this should worry him._

_Finally their laughter trickles out and Rose speaks, her voice still muffled by his sodden jacket. “I’m a bit wet here.”_

_“Really,” the Doctor comments._

_“And you’re not warm.”_

_“Neither are you,” he replies, although to him she is, in more ways than one. “There’s a fireplace in the TARDIS. And hot showers, and towels, and blankets. If you like.” The words are out of his mouth before he stops to think about the implications, but they catch up with him quickly—and pleasantly. He feels his face flame. “And soup! And tea!”_

_Rose rolls awkwardly off him and crawls to her feet, pulling him after her. She looks like a drowned cat. Fortunately the Doctor has the presence of mind not to say so._

_“Okay,” she says, “let’s—”_

_She never gets to finish the sentence, because the Doctor seizes her hand and hauls her away gleefully at top speed._

_“Run!”_

_The TARDIS is parked in an alley near the park, and they are almost on it when the Doctor sees the woman by the bench, the only person (other than the two of them) dumb enough to be out in this weather. Her hair is dark, slicked to her head, and her skin icy pale. Her silver-grey dress is shadowed by rain. There is a tattoo of a rose on her shoulder._

_He stumbles, sure of her face and does a double-take. But the woman is gone._

_“What?” Rose asks, skidding to a stop beside him._

_“Sorry,” he manages through the shock. “I thought I saw something…strange. But I didn’t. The TARDIS is just over here—come on!”_

_He sends Rose off to the shower and, as he drips into the grated floor, tries to tell himself that it is nothing, just like the tattooed docker and the clear-faced coffee-seller on Barcelona and the vague memory of a child. But this face is too familiar. The woman in grey is not nothing._

_Suddenly he wonders if any of them were._

* * * * *

**The Medusa Cascade  
2008  
The Doctor is 904**

_“Who—” the Doctor croaks, “who the hell are you?”_

There is a tiny silence, before the cavernous room echoes with the sharp squawk of angry Daleks.

“EXTER—” 

“—minate, yes, I know,” the strange woman finishes casually over the sound of weapons fire, safe inside the bounds of the TARDIS’ renewed extrapolator shielding. “Haven’t you tried that before? But here we are.”

“We are victorious!” Davros cries, but his voice is already climbing with uncertainty. “Your identity is irrelevant. You will stand and watch your world burn!”

“Haven’t any choice, have I?” she asks, leaning against the TARDIS with her hands in the Doctor’s coat pockets. “Nothing could stop you?”

“We are legion,” Dalek Caan interjects with a mad cackle. “No human can wipe the Daleks from the sky! It is foretold! Only—”

“Only the Abomination,” the woman finishes. “But that’s all right, then. I don’t repeat my effects.”

The Crucible is suddenly, utterly silent, except for the giggling of Dalek Caan.

“No,” the Doctor says at last. “No.”

Green eyes meet his. “Always.” They move away, long enough for her to smile reassuringly at Jackie, and then she returns her attention to the Daleks.

“Try this instead,” she offers, raising a small silver object and flicking its switch.

“EXTER—” 

The Daleks simply stop, weapons unfired, eyestalks slowly fading to black. 

“Wow. It really works,” the woman says wonderingly, staring at the device cradled in her palm. “That—I can’t _count_ how many times that might’ve come in handy.” She slips the device back into the brown coat’s bottomless pocket and selects a button from the nearest panel. The prison-lights disappear. “Doctor, I—oh. Hello.”

He is already in front of her, right in front of her, staring, as she turns back to address him. And suddenly silence and shock give way to fury: of all the illusions, why this?

“On New Earth,” he demands through gritted teeth, “the sister with the Face of Boe—”

“Novice Hame,” she answers placidly. “You want to know who I am. You want me to prove it, yeah?”

He ignores the unspoken invitation. “Woman Wept, where—”

“In the constellation Virgo, ‘as you humans think of it’, that’s what you said.” She rolls her eyes. “We hiked the waves at the Bay of Tears, and I lost my left crampon. You had to drag me home over the ice, ‘cos I couldn’t walk. I never told anyone that bit—ask Mickey.”

Without meaning to, he turns to catch Mickey’s incredulous eye. “She didn’t. Rose, I know what the doctors said, but this is…this is _weird_.”

“And you are _gorgeous_ , by the way,” Jack interjects, wiping away a tear surreptitiously. “Welcome back, Rosie. We all thought…”

“I was,” she answers quietly. “I’ll tell you the story, but I think we should finish up with this—” she gestures at the frozen Daleks “—first. Can anyone fly this thing?” 

The Doctor turns away abruptly. “Simple!” he crows with forced cheer, and begins to investigate the nearest control bank. “Shut down the bomb, check. Transmit the nano-wave signal—brilliant, that—across the fleet, check. Gravitational fields, hull lockdowns, buh-bye power cores—one great lump of Dalek fleet, stuck together for all time, out of sync with the universe. Perfect! Which just leaves the planets. All those ejected cores—plenty of power for one giant shockwave, and _home they go!_ Earth, safely back in the Sol System by teatime.” He presses one last button with a flourish.

“You do think you’re brilliant, don’t you, spaceman?” Donna drawls, with more than her usual sarcasm. Jackie’s lip twitches in spite of the uncertainty in her eyes.

“Now,” he carries on, voice climbing maniacally, “back to the TARDIS for us. The universe, saved again!” He whirls back to them and glances from face to face, looking for encouragement, praise, anything to keep up the act.

He finds six expressions full of confusion, belonging to six people who have taken a step back, forming a half-circle around him and…her.

“Is it really so hard…” she chokes on her own voice. Taking a deep breath, she forces herself to continue. “Is it so hard to believe it’s me?”

“It’s impossible,” he replies, turning to unlock the TARDIS. “Rose was human. Come on, all of you. Inside.”

No one moves, not even a twitch. She sniffs once, quietly, and it nearly breaks him. Whoever she is, _whatever_ she is, she truly believes she is human. That she is Rose. It does break Jackie, who shatters the shocked tableau by running to her side and seizing her shoulder. She stares up at the new face, fingering the ginger hair, wiping away the tears.

“Told you not to come, Mum,” she sniffs. “Told you it would be hard, whatever happened. Didn’t even think about _this_.”

“Not come? I’ll have you know I saved _her_ life!” Jackie fires back, waving a hand vaguely at Sarah Jane. “Me! An’ what would’ve happened if I hadn’t? You and him, you always think I’m not good enough—are you laughing at me? Am I so _funny_? Am I always—” She stops abruptly, staring up at the taller woman. “Oh m’god. You’re really…you’re really Rose.”

“Told ya.” And her smile is pure, unadulterated Rose Tyler. Jackie flings her arms around her daughter and bursts into noisy tears.

The Doctor is still facing away from them, staring aimlessly through the open door of the TARDIS. “Not possible,” he repeats quietly.

“I think we—” Jack begins in a mediating tone, but Rose interrupts over Jackie’s shoulder, addressing the Doctor’s back. 

“Do you know, Doctor, I think I can guess why you never took me to Barcelona. Barcelona, where the dogs have no noses, you said.”

The statement is so absurd that he turns back to them in spite of his determination to ignore her. “What?”

“I wondered sometimes.” She scrubs at her nose with the back of her hand and gently disentangles herself from Jackie’s arms. “Why we never went. But I get it now, yeah?”

She closes her eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath, her face settling into an almost-familiar look of compassion and insight that comes far too close to home. With two quiet steps, she is in front of him, her hand coming to rest gently on his chest. The Doctor manages not to flinch. Barely.

“You didn’t want to go anymore,” she continues gently. “You didn’t want to go because it was the first thing you said to me with your new…you, and I, I didn’t believe you. I was so _scared_ , Doctor, and so angry, and so sad. I said give him back. I said you weren’t him…weren’t _you_. 

“Barcelona,” Rose says forcefully, and this time the Doctor does flinch. “See? Even now. It’s what you couldn’t be, for me.”

Rose’s eyes were soft and brown, comforting and familiar, but with enough behind them that he never wanted to stop searching. The hint of gold at the edge of his vision when he looked into them never failed to tantalize. These eyes, vivid green, with a faceted emerald fierceness behind the brimming tears, are uncharted territory, prisms that refract him in unfamiliar light. 

And at the back of them, at the edge of his gaze, scattered like stars through the iris: bright living gold.

The Doctor realizes abruptly that her palm is still laying against his sternum, but now his is wrapped around it, fingers curled tightly against hers, pulling both their hands painfully between his hearts. And that is the answer.

In the background, he half-registers Jack breaking the silence, turning up his irresistible charm as he herds the others into the TARDIS. The door falls closed, and the Doctor lets his forehead come to rest against Rose’s. 

“I’m scared,” he whispers hoarsely, helplessly. 

“Me too,” she replies. “I’ve never done this before. Traveling with you and working at Torchwood, I’ve seen things I couldn’t believe, lots of things. But this…”

He chokes out what was meant to be a chuckle but feels suspiciously close to a sob. “Could be worse. You could…” _have stayed dead_ , he thinks, and pushes it away. “You could have woken up with the worst hair of your life and a permanently annoyed face, wearing _plaid_.”

Rose giggles tearily. “Please tell me it’s not that bad?”

“Well, it was for me. Took me over a century to get rid of that haircut. But you…” The Doctor lifts his head and studies Rose critically. “Ginger—why do _I_ never get to be ginger? You’re rather tall. Gangly, a bit.”

“A giraffe, then,” she sighs. “That’s why I feel all…wobbly. An Irish giraffe.”

“Nah,” he scoffs. “Let me be the first to say it: you…” The Doctor takes a deep breath. “ _Rose Tyler._ You look beautiful.”

At the sound of her name, she seems to shake an immense burden from her shoulders. “For a human,” she laughs, and leans into him, wrapping her free arm firmly around him while leaving their joined hands trapped beneath her shoulder.

He buries his face in the curve of her neck, his coat under his cheek and her scorched hair trailing delicately across his closed eyes. Neither does much to hide the sudden harshness of his breathing or his desperate—and largely unsuccessful—attempts to hold back tears. 

It takes him a good three tries to get the words around the lump in his throat, but eventually he manages it. “No, not for a human. Or not just for a human. For whatever miracle you are. For you. _Rose._ ” 

He does cry then, but so does she: tears and miracles in a sea of silent Daleks. And eventually, for the second time that day, they go home to the TARDIS.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SHE LIVES!!!
> 
> Ahem.
> 
> Regarding the permanently annoyed face, terrible haircut, and plaid: Nothing against Two...but I can't see him being Ten's favorite past self. Especially sartorially (but then I imagine Ten cringes at the thought of pink coats and frilly shirts and question-mark pullovers too...)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This story was written and published in 2013 (?), except for one small detail: I neglected to finish putting it up on AO3. At long last, I remember to post the last two chapters! Oops.

__**Salierion ¾  
9 Alpha 3M54  
The Doctor is 903**

_He and Martha are leaving a concert on Salierion ¾ when he sees it again and has the presence of mind to follow it for the first time._

_He tugs on her hand and she protests, trying to keep up in her heels and gown without losing her silk shawl. “Doctor, what—”_

_He knows he has never been very kind to Martha. He has never quite been what she needs, and he could never be what she wants. He shoves the guilt far away and walks faster, eyes narrowing._

_“Hey! Doctor! Is something wrong?”_

_“Follow the white rabbit,” he replies without looking at her. He stays fixed on his goal. This time the rose decorates the ankle and calf of a woman he has never seen before, her honey-blond hair cut short around her face._

_“Not in these shoes,” Martha mutters, but tries gamely anyway. “Who’s the white rabbit?”_

_“Her,” the Doctor says, pointing several couples ahead of them, to where the woman is walking arm in arm with a bronze-skinned man whose broad face is kind and lit by sharply clever eyes._

_Martha rolls her eyes. “Who’s she?”_

_“Don’t know, never met her before. Look at her leg.”_

_“Oh,” Martha sighs, glimpsing the tattoo. “Look, Doctor, I understand, and if you need to talk about it that’s fine, I’m here. Please talk about it, actually. But you can’t just follow strange women about in the street because they have rose tattoos.”_

_“It’s more complicated than that, I’m afraid,” he says through gritted teeth. “I wish I knew why.”_

_Martha is silent, but he can feel the concern and disapproval radiating off her. The woman and her companion round a corner and disappear._

_“No! Hurry!” The Doctor tugs harder on Martha’s hand._

_“Why I follow you, I don’t even—” she begins as they go around the corner and nearly run headlong into the other couple._

_“Not here,” the woman says hastily. “Not today.” Her companion falls back from the other three, well out of reach._

_“Who are—” the Doctor begins sharply, but the blond woman cuts him off._

_“It’s not time yet,” she insists. “It_ will _be. It won’t be long. But I can’t talk about it now. You need to go. Quickly.”_

_“I’ve seen it before,” the Doctor pursues relentlessly, gesturing at the tattoo on her leg. “I saw it on—”_

_“Stop!” the blond woman shouts. “Don’t say another word. Get out of here. Now.”_

_The Doctor opens his mouth again, looking even more furiously sad, but Martha grabs his arm before he can speak. “Doctor,” she says quietly._

_He looks down at her stiffly, as if everything in him resists the motion, and her face pleads with him wordlessly. The concern in her eyes is nearly unbearable. He jerks his head away, but when he turns his eyes back toward the blond woman, she and her companion are gone. There is only an empty alley before them._

_“C’mon, Doctor,” Martha tugs gently at his arm. “Please. You’re worrying me.”_

_He stands his ground, and for a moment they stare at each other in tense silence. But it is no use: the strange woman is gone, and he knows Martha is right anyway. At last he relaxes a fraction and follows her._

_Halfway down the block, Martha clears her throat awkwardly. “The concert was beautiful. What was that instrument the dancers were playing? The one that sounded when they moved.”_

_Before he can answer, she stumbles hard as another pedestrian runs into her. One of her heels cracks loudly on the uneven pavement._

_“Hey, mate, watch—” she starts to shout as the blond woman hurries past her. “What?”_

_Across the street, the woman’s companion smiles wryly at the Doctor and winks. When she reaches him, she grabs his hand and pulls him away at a run._

_Beside the Doctor, Martha is shaking her foot out of the shoe absently while she unfolds a wad of paper from her clenched hand._

_“What’s that?” he asks. “Did she give you that?”_

_“Yeah,” Martha replies, puzzled. “She shoved it into my hand when she pushed me.” She turns the paper over and studies the message._

_“What does it say?”_

_Martha is silent for a moment. “She says not to tell you.” She picks up her broken shoe and starts walking unevenly toward the TARDIS. He follows, arguing and entreating loudly, but she refuses to acknowledge him. She hates to do it, but sometimes the only way to win an argument with the Doctor is to run away._

_In her room, she locks the door and smoothes the paper again on her desk. The message is simple, signed only with a cartoonish imitation of the woman’s tattoo._

__

> Don’t show him this, Martha. It’s important. I promise you’ll understand someday. Look out for him. But don’t doubt yourself—you’re the strongest of us anyway, and all our lives depend on it. Don’t ever give up.

__

_Martha reads it again and again, fixing the words on her mind. She supposes that when you travel in time, mysterious notes from strangers can turn out to be important messages from friends sometime in the future, even if they seem a little melodramatic. When she has memorized the lines, she stares at the doodle, recalling the Doctor’s tense and urgent questions, the ones he will almost certainly continue to ask, and which will equally certainly take him closer and closer to the edge of reason, until… After a long moment, Martha nods decisively to herself and rummages in the desk drawer for a lighter. In the dark ensuite, she burns the message over the sink, watching the image of her face in the mirror shift with the leaping flames._

_Not too long afterwards, there comes a whole year in which Martha relives those words every day._

* * * * *

**London, Earth, Pete’s World  
2013  
The Doctor is 904**

Everything is a bit mad for a while after the Doctor and Rose rejoin the others in the crowded console room. There is the small matter of nudging the Earth back into its proper orbit around Sol, and then trying to puzzle out who goes home where. Sarah Jane is eager to get back to her son, and Martha goes readily too, to comfort her family and pass on a very pointed message about self-destruct weapons to UNIT. Mickey watches her with more than a little interest, which alarms the Doctor but seems to amuse Rose, and leaves with a reluctant Jack. In fact, the Doctor thinks Jack will refuse to go at all, but Rose whispers briefly in his ear, earning a smile, a nod, and some kind of inaudible response that makes her pale skin flush bright red. He and Mickey leave together in Cardiff, demanding a swift return. Donna, naturally, is going nowhere, so that leaves Jackie. And Rose.

The Doctor slips the TARDIS through one of the last gaps between the universes and lands in another London, so like the one he knows, but with a sky full of zeppelins and a more-or-less openly operating Torchwood. A competent one, too: when the TARDIS doors open, several armed agents and Pete Tyler are waiting. 

Jackie runs out and into the arms of her relieved husband, oblivious to the others. Rose hovers in the doorway, with the eyes of four Torchwood operatives following her suspiciously. Three of them clearly view this as a fairly workaday mission, but the fourth, a young woman, seems uncertain, as if she is waiting for something.

“It’s okay, Ayesha,” Rose says softly. “It’s me.” She draws herself up, addressing all four agents. “Agent R. Tyler, rho-tau-three-eight-seven Prime. Stand down.” 

“The key-phrase?” one of the men demands efficiently. The fact that nobody bats an eye at Rose’s appearance says something about either the world this Torchwood inhabits or the office gossip chain, or maybe both.

“Twelve apple six shawarma,” Rose replies, wrinkling her nose. “Now I’m hungry.”

The four agents holster their weapons, unfazed. Pete and Jackie are still oblivious, clinging to each other while Jackie whispers rapidly in her husband’s ear. Rose steps over the threshold onto the street, the Doctor slipping into her place in the doorway.

The agent called Ayesha hesitates only a moment, stepping up to Rose and examining the taller woman’s face in wonder. “I was right,” she says faintly. “I was right and now I don’t know if I want to celebrate or cry.”

“You were right,” Rose reassures softly. “You were right and it saved everything. If I hadn’t known… Doctor Mohamed,” she continues with mock formality, “you’ve saved the world. What’re you going to do now?”

Ayesha sniffles and swipes at her eyes, smearing her eyeshadow. She takes a deep breath and nods firmly, decisively, reaching into her pocket. “I’m going to give you this. It’ll help you explain.”

Rose pockets the proffered thumb drive before pulling her friend into a fierce hug. “I won’t forget you,” she murmurs. “I’m never gonna forget. Never ever.”

Ayesha giggles. “Drop by for tea when you’re in the neighborhood, will you?”

Rose laughs. “I will too. Don’t be surprised. Okay?”

The Doctor can see where this is going. Uneasily he crosses over to the curb, where Jackie and Pete are whispering urgently. 

“Jackie,” he begins, but finds himself at a loss as to whether he should plead or apologize. 

“Don’t,” she says fiercely, stabbing a finger in his face. He spares a thought to be grateful she’s forgotten about the Preacher’s gun strapped to her back. “Don’t you _dare_. If you do that bloody noble self-sacrificing _thing_ and try to abandon her again, I will _not_ be responsible for my actions. D’you hear me? Twice you’ve done that and she won’t stand for it again, _and neither will I_. She told me all about it, after we came here, she told me she remembered what happened after she tore your ship up to go back to you. She told me she made a promise that’s much, _much_ bigger than you are. And more’n you deserve, if you ask me. If you don’t know what it is, you’re even more of an idiot than I thought. And that’s sayin’ something.”

Somewhere behind him Donna guffaws merrily. “You tell him, Jackie!”

The Doctor opens his mouth and closes it again. 

“Don’t you say a word,” Jackie admonishes. “Except you’d best thank Pete for his cyber-organic-whatsit-disruptor, since it saved the lot of us. Now.”

“Thank you,” the Doctor says obediently, turning to the other Tyler. “That’s what Rose used? I wondered.”

Pete nods. “Jake Simmonds—do you remember him?—created the prototype when he and Mickey were fighting the Cybermen in France. It cut off the interface between the human brain and the cybernetic body. I’ve been tinkering with it since. Rose thought it could be adapted to work against Daleks.”

“You have Daleks here?” the Doctor asks with alarm.

“No,” Pete shakes his head. “Rose remembered. She remembered things she shouldn’t have known. The rest…she’ll be the one to tell you.”

The Doctor expects he knows the gist of it—and when, and how—already. He looks over his shoulder to where Rose is talking to the small group of Torchwood agents. Farewell is written clearly on all of their faces.

“She should tell you,” Pete repeats. “And you don’t have time for her to do it here.”

“Come on,” Jackie says softly, tugging at his arm. “This isn’t your home, and you know it’s not hers either.”

“Thank you,” the Doctor says again, almost aimlessly. Pete nods solemnly and pulls out his mobile, turning away.

Halfway to Rose, Donna intercepts him and pulls him away from Jackie, back toward the TARDIS. “Give them a minute, Doctor.”

They hang back near the ship while Rose enfolds Jackie in a tight hug, murmuring in her ear the whole while. The Doctor feels himself detaching from the scene, as if it is still far away in another universe, as if he is bleeding into it, an impossible world in which you _can_ go home again. If Donna were not gripping his shoulder so fiercely, her nails sharp grounding points of pain, he would never believe it. 

Deep in the TARDIS, a low bell rings out: the universes are closing again. The Doctor tries to speak, but no sound comes out. Rose is kissing Jackie gently on the cheek and stepping back. Then she looks up at him, smiling through her tears, and starts to walk.

“She’ll never see them again,” he croaks to Donna.

“This morning you said she was _dead_ , Spaceman,” Donna replies. “Then she grew a new body and shut down the whole lot of Daleks and saved the world, and you say _never_.” She harrumphs and pulls him over to the console.

The Doctor has to admit she has a point. Then Rose is in the TARDIS, turning back, waving, tears coursing over a ridiculous grin. She closes the door herself.

After all that, it only takes one switch to send them home to their own universe. _Home._


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are totally devoted to basically any semi-canonical Doctor backstory...uh, sorry. :)
> 
> This is it! Thanks for reading. I don't know that this story has a direct sequel (I hope so!), but I do have some related vignettes that I hope to post in the future.

_**Epilogue... Six months later...** _

**Antriska IV  
13621  
The Doctor is 905**

“What d’you think we should do first? Shopping or drinks?”

Over the widening expanse of pedestrians and bicyclists between them, he can’t quite make out Rose’s response—she has a quiet voice for such a tall, dramatic-looking woman—but Jack’s is unmistakable.

“Oh _no_ , girls. First we start with the _dancers_ , while we’re still sober enough to really appreciate them. My only question is ladies, gentlemen, or both?”

Donna’s guffaws carry over the noise of the festival crowd as Rose, arms linked with her companions, turns a corner and vanishes. The Doctor settles back on his bench, feeling strangely that he has nowhere else to be. The TARDIS (specifically the local chronometer) is being her temperamental self, he has a bit of an odd feeling about today’s date on this planet, and he’s just entrusted his best mate and his beloved to Jack Harkness, but he feels no compulsion to rush off and busy himself with fixing any of it. That has happened more and more since Rose woke up with copper curls and green eyes: contentment. He can’t remember feeling it before, not even as a child. There had always been something, some beautiful or terrible or simply fascinating thing, gleaming under a sun sinking too fast for him to find it. It had even haunted a boy too young for the Academy, burying his secrets among the roots of a hideaway tree.

“She has a beautiful face,” a voice says from the seat beside him, and he nearly leaps from the bench in astonishment. “You’re lucky. But then, so is she.”

He opens his mouth, but no sound comes out because his brain has finally caught up with his eyes. Next to him sits a woman, a black-haired woman with impossibly pale skin in a blue-grey dress, pulling a chain over her head. _Perception filter_ , a distant corner of his mind supplies, while the rest piles up unhelpfully around the roadblock of **impossible**. 

“What?”

She laughs, a delighted peal that fills the whole street and carries with it a long-suppressed memory of her face, winking at a child across thousands of years. 

“You still say that! Say it again,” she demands gleefully, but he already is.

“What?!”

“And here we go, one more time…”

“WHAT?!”

“Yes! Oh, Doctor, it’s wonderful to see you. Really, it is.”

His mouth works a few times like a fish. “Who…” he manages, “who are you?”

Her smile fades. “A whole lifetime, hundreds of years, you’ve spent looking for the answer to that question. Don’t you already know?” And she shrugs back the loose shoulder of her dress, revealing the twisting green and blooming red. 

He does know. He has known for ages, but he hasn’t been able to let himself believe it. And even now…

Fortunately, she continues. “I went out of my way, you know, to let you see me on that vid when you were eight. I didn’t expect you to know me then, or after the Time War, but I thought you might after the Titanic, since you did go back for me. The other me, I mean. And I _know_ you’ve known, some part of you, since you took the Vortex from me when I was nineteen.” She looks wistful for a moment, and he wonders if it would be a terrible thing to ask how old she is now.

His lips can’t seem to form _you’re Rose_ , so he blurts, “you’re _Lucas?_ ”

“Was Lucas, yes. Among others.” She pitches her voice lower. “Love’s a complicated thing, she is.”

“You’re going to—”

“Obviously,” she rolls her eyes. “But don’t tell me. Waking up as a man was even worse than the time I woke up hating chips, at first. But after that—well, you remember, don’t you.”

He nods, blushing. That was Rose? And they—

“Right,” he says hastily. “No more details.”

She smirks at him. “Funny how prudish you get—this you, I mean. I love watching you blush. But here’s a game for you: you’ve got nine minutes before Jack gets them thrown out of the most _incredible_ shop of naughties and you have to rescue your bride from her own hen night. So ask me. Ask me whatever you like, and I’ll answer it, if I can.”

He gapes at her. “You can’t just _do_ that! Free information from the future?! That’s—that’s impossible! And irresponsible! You’ll bring down Reapers, worse than Reapers, and you should know, if you’re really—”

“—the great philosopher-ethicist known as the Other, a shadowy hero who rebelled and threw himself into the Looms to be genetically reconstituted in some other body?” She grimaces. “Legends. Total bollocks. Well, not _total_ , but obviously I didn’t fling myself into the Looms, and I’m not a man. Usually. Wasn’t then, anyway. And that old fairy tale about you being the reincarnation? _Completely_ mad. There’s almost nothing to it. I invented time travel—I _am_ time travel—so don’t lecture me about ethics.”

_I am time travel._ And long ago, _I can see everything, all of time and space_. The Bad Wolf, the greatest paradox the universe has ever survived, far bigger than the Time War. _I create myself._ A mystery profound enough that it could be given no title, not even on Gallifrey. 

Rose. Woven into the fabric of the universe, a story that only the two of them will ever really know, and he sincerely doubts either of them will ever know it completely.

“History,” she continues placidly, as if she has not just explained the heart of the universe, the history of his species, and the puzzle of his life, “is told by the people who are left—you know that better than anyone. And I’d disappeared so they wouldn’t try to kill me and discover they couldn’t. No surprise they attached a dramatic story to it. But I was there for most of it. Rassilon just wanted power, you know? For order, not domination. He wasn’t a bad man in the beginning. And Omega was a genius, but with more potential than direction. He liked experimenting. Reminded me of you, a bit. Between the two of them…they might have come up with brilliant technologies and energy sources. Never time travel.”

“You. _You_ invented time travel,” he repeats like an idiot. 

“They asked me questions I didn’t even realize I was answering. It was instinct. But everything went wrong. I woke up a TARDIS—you should have seen that—and then it was all so far out of my hands…” she murmurs, looking down at her hands. “I liked Omega. Rassilon drove me mad—Gallifrey ascendant, extra sequins required on all ceremonial robes, blah blah blah—but I genuinely liked Omega, and I didn’t know your history, so I played right into it. You can’t tell me,” she says, looking up at him as tears leak from her eyes. “You can’t tell the other me anything. God, I wish… It’s why the TARDIS doesn’t translate Gallifreyan. So I can’t know. Otherwise I’ll change it and you’ll never have been born. Please, Doctor, ask me something else.”

“How long ago,” he asks quietly, “did you leave there? For you?”

She sits silently, folded in on herself, for over a minute before she whispers, “I’ve been looking for you—any you—for…too long. But it feels like yesterday.” She looks up at him nakedly, and he sees something like the Time War painted across her face.

“Rose, I’m so sorry.” He is, deeply, and knows suddenly and piercingly exactly what she felt when she knelt in the snow as a nine-year-old child and forced a dying soldier to go on living. But she smiles tentatively, just a little. “It is still Rose, right?”

“I’ve got even more names than the Oncoming Storm. I wasn’t Rose on Gallifrey, but I’ve never been anything else to you.”

“Good.” It is more of a relief than he expected, and he suddenly feels like he might stay afloat through this storm after all. “Good.”

She takes a deep breath and swipes the tears from her cheeks. “Five minutes.”

He has far more questions than words. “The Time Lock…how did you break it?”

“I didn’t.”

“But to get the TARDIS there—”

“I said I’d answer everything I could, Doctor. Not everything.” She drops her eyes to her lap; in profile, pale and pensive, she looks like delicately carved marble.

“I wasn’t with you, was I,” he says slowly. “Not on Gallifrey. You went alone.”

“I did.”

Which makes perfect sense and none at all. Until he remembers nearly the first thing she said to him: _Doctor, it’s wonderful to see you._ As if it had been a long time.

“Rose, am I—” he can’t finish the sentence, and he knows she couldn’t answer the question if he could.

“We’re all stories in the end, Doctor,” she replies quietly. “We’re always dead somewhere, but we’re also always alive somewhere else. And you and I are particularly important stories.”

He blinks furiously, feeling like an idiot. “Which means what?”

Her lips quirk in a way that is palpably reminiscent of his first Rose. “It means I don’t think you should worry about it too much. Two minutes.”

“One, actually,” he says, putting a number of things together with a sudden burst of clarity. _That_ is the niggling problem with the date today, the one that he has been ignoring since they landed. Antriska IV, _today_ , with Rose. More than one Rose. There is no possible way the broken local chronometer on the TARDIS is a coincidence. And now he knows why. “I need you to do me a favor.”

“What? Why?” She is off-balance for the first time, making him unreasonably happy to be the one who understands for a moment.

“I’ve been here twice, he replies, “and you’ve been here three times now. I nearly forgot. Something was bothering me about today’s date, and I just puzzled it out. I brought you here…oh, ages ago. This face—” he gestures at himself “—was still new. Do you remember?”

A slow smile spreads across her face. “The day we got soaked in the Century Storm? That’s _today_?”

“Which explains why I’m going to take you and Jack and Donna to some other planet for your hen night. Where would you like to go, do you think?” He grins back.

“Oh, Oasia, I think.”

“ _Really?_ ”

“It was perfect! You’ve never been to a hen party, so you don’t know. Absolutely perfect. Keep it in mind. And what was the favor?”

“Stay here, please. Just for a few minutes, maybe a quarter of an hour at most. Without your perception filter. I’m sorry, but you’re going to get really, _really_ wet.”

She lifts the modified TARDIS key. “You saw me, didn’t you. I remember now…you stopped like you saw something, but you said it was nothing.”

“Only a glimpse,” he confirms. “Let me get a glimpse, and then put it on.”

“A message,” she laughs. “To yourself.”

“So I come back,” he agrees. “So I know to keep looking.”

She smiles. “You would never stop looking anyway.” And then she kisses him, gentle and slow. When their lips part, she rests her forehead against his, hands on his shoulders. “I’ll find you again soon. But I think it will be a long time for you. You’ve got a long, long time to be happy with her—me—in the right order.” She looks up and meets his eyes earnestly. “I’ve never forgotten a moment of it. And you won’t either.

“But now you should go.” 

He starts to protest, but after what must be hundreds of years, she is still Jackie Tyler’s daughter and Donna’s best girlfriend, with a wicked grin and a determined mind. “Go!” she laughs, giving him a shove out onto the sidewalk. “Be heroic, save the day, get the girl. And don’t do anything my mum would slap you for.”

When he looks back to say goodbye, she has vanished. 

The Doctor turns toward the corner. Thunder is rumbling in the distance. Somewhere in this city, there are three Roses leading him. And Jack Harkness is about to get one of them into a great deal of mischief. 

The Doctor crosses the street into the future. In the park, the Bad Wolf smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> This story references certain elements of the extended Whoniverse, particularly the novel _Lungbarrow_ , and blatantly ignores others. If I made mistakes, pretend I did it on purpose. :) I love the backstory, but I'm glad [the late-80s writers never had the chance to canonically demystify the Doctor](http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Cartmel_Masterplan). The Doctor should always be mystifying. And, in this case, mystified. :)


End file.
